Pro-Obama PAC to Shift Focus in Support of Hillary Clinton

Priorities USA, a political action committee that supported President Barack Obama last year, apparently is planning to morph into a pro-Hillary Clinton group in anticipation that she will run for president in 2016.

Citing unidentified sources, Politico reported Monday that the group has been considering the move for months and has not been discouraged by people close to Clinton.

According to Politico, Clinton supporters would like to see Priorities USA work together with Ready for Hillary, an independent political action committee started earlier this year to promote a Clinton run for the presidency.

The news comes, however, as some in the Clinton campaign are taking issue with the early pressure that the Ready for Hillary PAC appears to be putting not only on the former secretary of state but on her possible supporters.

"There is nothing they are doing that couldn’t have waited a year. Not a single [expletive] thing," an unidentified Clinton aide said in a New York magazine profile on Clinton.

In the profile, the aide described the PAC as a rogue initiative that did not have Clinton's stamp of approval, even though a number of her supporters and long-time advisers, including Harold Ickes, are helping to direct its efforts.

Those efforts appear to be paying off. The group has a growing list of supporters and some Clinton friends and backers are beginning to act as though it is her duty to run for president.

"She’s running, but she doesn’t know it yet," a source told New York magazine. "It’s just like a force of history. It’s inexorable, it’s gravitational. I think she actually believes she has more say in it than she actually does."

Even though there is no official Clinton candidacy, the unofficial Hillary PAC already has close to 1 million "likes" on Facebook and is preparing to launch a video that includes her soaring concession speech from 2008, when she lost in the Democratic primaries to Barack Obama, CNN reported Monday.

The video focuses on the notion that a woman will soon be elected president. It shows clips of the suffrage movement and of Clinton noting in her concession speech to Obama that, "We will someday launch a woman into the White House."

A Clinton announcement of her intentions is unlikely to come until after next year's mid-term elections, but just talk of her potential candidacy is generating lots of support.

By the end of July, for example, the Ready for Hillary PAC had received almost $1.2 million in contributions to help continue the draft-Clinton effort, according to the Huffington Post.

Priorities USA, a political action committee that was supportive of President Barack Obama last year, is apparently planning to morph into a pro-Hillary Clinton group in anticipation that she will run for president in 2016.